


miss twenty-something

by quidhitch



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bats, Birthday Presents, Books, Gen, Jason Todd-centric, M/M, and Babes, the four Bs of jason todds life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-13 11:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20173597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quidhitch/pseuds/quidhitch
Summary: “I’ve read it before,” Jason said. It was almost the truth. He’d checked it out from the Gotham Public Library and gotten through roughly half of it before his mom dunked it in the bathtub during a bad trip. “It’s cool. Let’s just go eat lunch.”Bruce had magic eyes — the kind that were so clear and sharp that his stare alone could cut through people’s bullshit before they even had a chance to spew it. “You look down and to the left when you lie,” he said, voice still gentle. “You should watch that.”Or, Jason Todd grows up and finds a home. It takes a little longer than expected.





	miss twenty-something

**Author's Note:**

> 1) i made my friends vote on this title and THEY PICKED THIS.... supposed to b a reference to 20 something by sza bc my jason playlist is like honestly MOSTLY sza
> 
> 2) i started writing this fic bc i wanted to explore jasons feelings about ~home and also what this character looks like when he's in a stable environment. so im drawing bits and pieces of different timelines and runs into an ideal frankensetting. 
> 
> 4) can't ever get [this](https://11thsense.tumblr.com/post/186171470675/jason-todd-things-ft-pierre-boncompain-click) jason out of my head while i'm writing

The Wayne family library had a whole case of first editions that cost so much money Jason was afraid to touch them, to even look at them. The first time Bruce had gone and plucked a crumbling copy of _The Secret Garden_ off the top shelf, Jason was so shocked he briefly had the impulse to roundhouse kick him in the face.

“Are you really supposed to touch them like that?” he’d asked, tugging nervously at one of his too-long sleeves. His sweatshirt used to be white but had long settled into a drab-looking gray. Though Alfred stocked his closet with hole-free fresh-smelling clothes the third morning after his arrival, Jason still wore his old stuff whenever he could get away with it. 

Bruce climbed nimbly down the ladder, landing on the carpeted floor with a soft thump. He looked invincible — strong and tall and sure of himself in a way Willis Todd had never been. He held the book out to Jason, the corner of his mouth lifted slightly. 

“Take it.”

Jason glanced between Bruce’s face and the book. “Dude. No.”

Bruce’s mouth twitched in amusement. “What’s the point of them sitting up there collecting dust? Books are supposed to be read.”

“I’ve read it before,” Jason said. It was almost the truth. He’d checked it out from the Gotham Public Library and gotten through roughly half of it before his mom dunked it in the bathtub during a bad trip. Returning the severely water damaged copy meant he was barred from taking books home for three months. At the time he’d almost cried with the unfairness of it. Now, with his mom dead and a whole library at his immediate disposal, he thought it was a pretty stupid thing to cry about. “It’s cool. Let’s just go eat lunch.”

Bruce had magic eyes — the kind that were so clear and sharp that his stare alone could cut through people’s bullshit before they even had a chance to spew it. “You look down and to the left when you lie,” he said, voice still gentle. “You should watch that.”

“I do not,” Jason had tried to argue, cheeks burning, but Bruce was already brushing past him, casually depositing _The Secret Garden_ on one of the desks. He didn’t lock the case back up and he didn’t look behind him, even when Jason started jogging after him to catch up. 

Invincible.

When the clock crept past midnight, while Alfred was asleep and Bruce was doing something down in the cave, Jason used the brand new reading light in his room to sneak back down into the library. Under the cover of night, he was less afraid to put his hands on the yellow pages, to pick up the book and feel the delicacy of the spine between his fingers. 

The inside cover was inscribed with a message — 

_Everything is made out of Magic, my darling. The world is your garden. From Elizabeth to Martha. _

It was strange, to think of Bruce as having been a scared little kid with no parents. He wondered if Bruce ever sat on the floor of the library and thought about how much he missed his mom. He wondered if Bruce ever pored over the pages of _The Secret Garden_, and felt his heart split apart with the desire to have a family. It was hard to imagine.

But that’s what Jason did that night, and the next night, and the night after that, until Bruce told him if he didn’t stop sneaking out of bed he’d stop being allowed out on patrol. This time, when Bruce handed him the book, he somehow found it in himself to take it. 

“Too bright for your own good, Master Jason,” Alfred told him, gently rumpling Jason’s curls. They had tea every day around three PM, right when Jason would come home from school. Jason liked sitting with him.

“Has Bruce read this one?”

“You’re allowed to ask him yourself, you know. I think he’d quite like to answer.”

“He’s cranky today. I mean, he’s cranky every day, but it’s especially fucking bad today.”

Alfred directed a sharp glance at Jason over the rim of his teacup. Jason pretended not to see him.

“Master Bruce wasn’t quite as prolific a reader as you, I’m afraid. He was a bit more particular about what he picked up and actually finished.”

Jason privately thought that must’ve sucked. Reading a book meant a break from his own thoughts, a break from the generally crappy life the world had granted him. To grow up trapped in his own head most of the time would’ve been a special kind of hell. 

“Huh,” was all he said aloud, but he was fairly certain Alfred could read minds, so it didn’t really matter anyway.

Alfred sat back in his chair, and for a moment, his wrinkled face seemed to echo another era, perhaps one that had been kinder to this house and family. He glanced down at the book between them. 

“The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off,” he gently stirred another sugar cube into his tea, glancing at Jason through the steam rising from the cup. “Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.”

Every book Jason brought downstairs, Alfred could read back a line with nearly perfect accuracy. Jason suspected that he was secretly an immortal who’d had thousands of years to memorize all the world’s literature and also elevate scone-making to a fine art.

“You trying to get into something, Pennyworth?” Jason said through a mouthful of crumbs, grinning.

“Of course not, Master Jason. Finish your tea.”

The manor had its own garden, of course. In the summer, Jason used to lay on his back and think about the slow crawl of ivy up the side of the house, and how things in the garden would grow and grow if Alfred never trimmed them. He could stay in that spot long enough that the green covered him completely, and then he’d be a permanent part of the manor, of this miraculous life that felt too good to really be his. 

Though he never imagined it would end the way it did, an end in some capacity had felt like the universe correcting itself, like the cosmic powers that be suddenly remembering that they hated Jason. He was never supposed to get a chance at deserving Bruce, or Alfred’s raspberry jam scones, or a first edition copy of _The Secret Garden_, or any of it. 

Even then, he’d known it couldn’t last forever.

So life went back to being just as “screw you, have some poisonous lemons” as it always was. And in the name of preserving what was left of his sanity, Jason tried to scrub his memories clean of every last perfect summer morning.

* * *

Jason enters his apartment with arms full of grocery bags and a shitty cellphone wedged between his ear and shoulder. “I cannot own a goddamn cat, Mia,” he says, as his goddamn cat emerges from the darkness and glides into the kitchen to rub his face all over Jason’s legs. “He was supposed to be out of here for-fucking-ever ago.”

“I know, I know!” Mia pleads in an unusually tinny voice. “I promise if you give me, like, one more week I’ll find someone to bite. I got my nephew on the ropes.”

She must be on her break at work. The call keeps cutting out and he can hear the faint thump of bass and staticky girlish laughter on the other end of the line. Jason deposits his grocery bags on the counter and considers his options. Langston — the cat — meows balefully against his ankle.

“He coughed up some nasty shit on my couch today.”

“Mm, yeah, cats do that. I swear it won’t be that much longer, Jay. You’re really, really doing me such a huge favor.”

“One week exactly,” he says sharply. “If you don’t come pick him up by then, I’m dropping him off at the club in a bow tie. You can tell people he’s a client.”

He hangs up after her ‘thankyouthankyouthankyou’ and tosses his phone against the counter, leaning down to scoop Langston up in his arms. Langston purrs appreciatively and butts his head against Jason’s chin, like he knows he’ll be shacking up in this palace rent-free a while longer. Smug little bastard. Jason scratches him behind the ears. 

“This place is disgusting.”

Jason nearly drops his cat in shock, and the only reason he doesn’t is that no one in their stupid family knew how to use the front door like an actual human being. This isn’t even the apartment’s first B and E this month. 

This does, however, constitute the most interesting perpetrator. 

“Aw, T,” Jason starts cautiously. “You say the sweetest things.”

He definitely checked his sightline like he always does whenever he enters a room — a leftover habit from living with the most paranoid man on the planet — but his scan didn’t do much good against Talia’s uncanny ability to become an inanimate object. Like a fucking shapeshifter. He only sees her the moment she wants him to, unfolding off the couch and stepping into the light with panther-like grace.

That reminds him of Bruce, too. The way he could just _be_ a shadow when he wanted to.

“You two were a match made in heaven, I swear.”

“Hm,” Talia says, mouth curling critically. “He might argue ‘hell’ is a more apt description.”

“Well, he spends 60% of his life wearing a cape. What does he know?”

Most of the time when Talia smiles with her mouth, it’s because she’s trying to make him feel like an idiot and also probably succeeding at it. When she’s genuinely amused, Jason can see it in her eyes.

There are stretches of Talia’s life that don’t belong to her, and Jason kind of gets that, because it wasn’t all that different for him when he was a kid. Being burdened with carrying out Ra’s bullshit meant shoving down who she was — who she wanted to be — in the name of getting a job done. 

In those months, she wasn’t the woman who held Jason in her lap and stroked his hair through the Lazarus sickness. She wasn’t the woman who saved him, or made him, or maybe just found him after the universe had chewed him up and spat him out. In those months, she was the daughter of the demon, and though she might never seriously hurt him, her presence would ruck up one hell of a migraine-inducing shitstorm.

That isn’t going to be an issue today. She’s smiling with her eyes and she’s standing barefoot in his apartment wearing _jeans_, of all things — her time is her own. He feels a small shiver of relief.

“You wanna stay for dinner?” Jason asks, setting Langston down on the floor. The cat approaches Talia cautiously, gently knocks his head against her calf. “I’m making moussaka.”

Talia leans down to stroke the cat once, then slides smoothly into one of the stools at the counter. Jason starts taking shit out of the fridge, reaching first for the wine.

“Am I going to get food poisoning from eating something prepared in this dump?”

“Maybe, but you know I’d take care of you.”

She makes a small, derisive noise in the back of her throat. It is distinctly Damian-esque, and it makes Jason wonder if she’s dropped in on the kid during her visit. Probably. He doesn’t want to examine the implication of her turning up here in the same stroke.

“The person on the phone,” Talia says, tracking him with mirthful eyes. “Was it your girlfriend?”

“No. She’s just a friend.”

“Quite late to be calling a friend.”

“Strippers keep weird hours,” Jason informs lightly. He pulls the cork out of the wine bottle with his teeth, and then selects the nicest looking plastic cup from his cupboard. “You really came all the way from Khadym to grill me about my nonexistent love life?”

“Yes,” Talia eyes his ‘I Heart Metropolis!’ souvenir cup. “Jason, if you need money—“

“I would know _exactly_ which gazillionaire to embezzle it from, alright? Now, come on. This’ll go a lot faster if you help.”

She purses her lips, but plucks a kitchen knife from the magnetic holder on the counter. Jason takes an eggplant out of one of the bags and sets it in front of her with a soft thump.

“What did you name the cat?”

“He doesn’t have a name.”

“You are far too sentimental for that,” Talia rolls her eyes, smiling with her mouth this time. And yep, Jason feels like an idiot. “It must be a character from Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or—“

“Langston Hughes,” Jason cuts in, smiling, too, now, despite himself. “He’s Langston, after Langston Hughes.”

“A fine name.”

“Thanks.”

* * *

Killer Croc takes a chunk out of Duke’s hip during patrol, and Jason’s apartment is a hell of a lot closer to Gotham central than the manor. As he drags Duke’s half-conscious body up six flights of stairs because the elevator is broken a-fucking-gain, he contemplates the few ways this could be worse. So far he’s come up with ‘running into Tim instead’.

“This is where you live?” Duke asks woozily, grip on Jason’s shoulder slackening. Jason tries to get a tighter hold on his waist without jostling him too much.

“Yep.”

“You’re, like… a ten-minute walk… from Mama Dough…”

“Are you seriously trying to talk to me about dumplings while you’re bleeding out?”

“They're really good dumplings…”

This fucking kid.

“You stay awake and I’ll buy you enough Mama Dough to feed a small army.”

Duke hums interestedly.

They make it up the stairs and leave a trail of blood behind them, but it doesn’t actually look that out of place against the dingy carpets, crumbling walls, and general… damp smell of the apartment building. That was the real unsung perk of living there.

Duke passes out before Jason deposits him on the living room, which is just as well because it means he isn’t awake for the stitches. Jason pulls a stool up by the couch and sets to work with a needle and thread, pulling the broken skin together and thinking about how weird it is that he’s doing this. He’s used to feeling like he’s lurking in Bruce’s shadow, or maybe even Dick’s, on darker days, but stitching up broken birds was typically Alfred’s wheelhouse. It’s a funny position to occupy. 

And it probably doesn’t help that he sees so much of himself in Duke — or at least so much of who he used to be.

Yikes. 

Once Jason has cleaned and disinfected the wound, he wipes his hands on his pants and reaches for his phone to shoot off a text to Bruce. He stares at the screen for a long time trying to come up with something appropriately bitchy. He just doesn’t want it to sound like he brought Duke back here as some kind of favor to Bruce. He did it because he likes Duke. Leave the dysfunctional family politics out of it.

_ You can cease shitting yourself into the third dimension. Thomas is at my place. He’s fine. _

By the time Bruce texts him back, Jason has shucked off his disgusting clothes, showered, cleaned Duke’s blood up off his floor, and adjusted the thermostat in the apartment to fit the needs of someone who had not spent considerable time as a corpse.

He gets a predictably monosyllabic response — _Thanks. _

For some reason it makes Jason want to throw his phone at the wall, but that’s his typical instinct when receiving any sort of electronic communication from Bruce. 

Before he goes to bed, he puts a glass of water and a bottle of painkillers on the table next to Duke, then tosses a throw blanket over his body. He’s sleeping with his mouth slightly open and for a moment his face looks shockingly young. Jason barely remembers what it was like, to be that young.

Langston usually sleeps on Jason’s bed, but tonight he’s curled up by Duke’s feet, head resting on Duke’s ankle. Good cat, Jason thinks.

The next morning he actually does go out and get Duke some Mama Dough, because he’s nothing if not a man of his word. Bruce would probably have something annoying to say about dumplings for breakfast, but as far as Jason was concerned, he could shove his nasty juicer up his entirely too-tight ass.

“Hey,” he greets as he steps back into the apartment. Duke is awake and sitting up, Langston curled into a cozy looking ball on his lap. He has the TV remote in one hand and the edge of Jason’s blanket folded up in the other. He looks tired, but not feverish-due-to-an-unforeseen-infection tired, so Jason figures he’s alright. 

“Man, that smells so good.”

“Gonna taste even better. How are you feeling?”

“Like I almost got snapped in half by a giant human-crocodile.”

“Fair enough."

The TV is on and there’s a bald kid with an arrow on his forehead running around the screen. Jason watches in mild amusement as he pours Duke another glass of water, gets a couple forks for their food. 

“This place might literally look like the inside of Satan’s asshole, but you know I’ve got more than basic cable, right?”

“Yeah, I looked.”

“No, no, I mean, I’ve got every single channel, Narrows. Sportscenter. Masterpiece Classic.” Jason crosses back into the living room, sets Duke’s food on the coffee table in front of him and flops back into the armchair next to the couch. He guesses he’s glad Alfred harangued him into getting more than one piece of furniture. “I’ve even got the After Hours ones that Bruce puts the parent lock on at the manor.”

Duke is smiling and shaking his head, “Shut up before I lose my appetite.”

They watch the show in silence for a couple minutes. Jason’s too tired to pay attention, and he’s also thinking about the fact that there’s a very real possibility Bruce is gonna turn up on his doorstep to check on Duke. Judgey parental commentary on his decor choices is about the last thing Jason wants to deal with today. That sort of thing was only cute when Talia did it.

“Thanks for stitching me up.”

“Sure.”

Duke shifts a little on the couch and Langston lets out a warbling meow of disapproval. “I watched a lot of cartoons growing up,” he says, stroking Langston’s head. “Houses I stayed in, there were always a bunch of kids. TV was on most of the time. It kept us quiet.”

“Yeah,” Jason says. They didn’t exactly have a flatscreen at Ma Gunn’s, but he understood the basic concept.

“I dunno, I guess I never grew out of it.”

“Why would you?” Jason throws his dirty boots up on the coffee table. “Avatar’s a fucking masterpiece.”

Duke grins. “That’s all I’m saying.”

* * *

Someone breaks into his apartment while he’s in the shower. Jason hears it through the hard spray of water — the sound of the door shaking open and creaking on its hinges, then the loud thump of heavy combat boots on linoleum.

This annoying for several reasons.

First of all, he just got the damn shower head at the right pressure and the water is actually hot for once. He also opened a box of new soap today and it’s fancy soap — not like his usual all-in-one shampoo, conditioner, body wash. 

For a moment, Jason contemplates just letting them steal all his shit. Unfortunately, he kind of likes his shit, plus Langston’s out there all alone.

He leaves the water on as he maneuvers out the tub, then struggles to pull his sweats over wet skin. He has a piece in the medicine cabinet and he reaches for it now, disengaging the safety with a soft click.

Leaving a thin trail of water behind him, he moves quietly out of the bathroom and down the hallway towards the kitchen. A series of unsettling clanging sounds get louder the further he ventures.

“Christ,” Jason breathes, as he rounds the final corner. “Harper, you incredible moron. I could’ve shot your arm off.”

Roy, who has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other, offers him a brazen grin. “Hey, Foxy. You miss me?”

“Are those scorch marks on the kitchen counter?” Jason asks, folding his arms over his still-damp chest. “You’ve been here less than ten minutes.”

“I got bored waiting.”

“Less than _ five _ minutes, probably.”

“This not at all the warm welcome I was expecting,” Roy brandishes his sandwich, unable to even feign offense, unable to look anything but stupidly happy. “And after I brought you wooden clogs from Amsterdam!”

Jason approaches, ducking his head to re-lock the safety on the gun and hide a smile. “You didn’t actually.”

“Hell yeah, I did. They’re red! And _ hand-painted _.”

“Fancy. You trying to get lucky or something?”

Once Jason is close enough, Roy hooks a finger in the waist of his sweats and tugs him forward, clumsily pulling their bodies together. Jason rests his hands on Roy’s biceps.

“Maybe,” Roy starts, smile something smaller and more private, now. “Do you think I have a shot?”

Jason leans forward to kiss him, first a soft, exploratory brush of lips, then something with a little more intent behind it. Roy’s arms circle around his waist, and Jason feels tension he didn’t even know he was holding drain out of his body. 

“How was Amsterdam?” Jason asks, tugging back just far enough to meet Roy’s eyes.

Roy makes a face. “Just ask what you wanna ask.”

“Fine. How was Ollie?”

“How is Bruce?” Roy counters.

“How was Ollie?”

“How is Bruce?”

“Alright, fuck off, then,” Jason leans back in for another kiss. Roy’s breath tastes like peanut butter from his sandwich. Jason knocks that stupid hat off his head to thread his fingers through Roy’s hair, which he seems to have thought to wash before coming. It feels nice. And soft. “You okay?”

“Man, you’re real sappy today. I should go to Europe without you more often.”

Jason smiles and cuffs him on the back of the head. Roy retaliates by launching off the kitchen counter, sending them both tumbling to the floor.

Jason definitely did not intend to fall in love with Roy Harper. In fact, the whole ordeal has been pretty damn inconvenient. Honor, nobility, generosity— he had done away with all that hero shit a long time ago, lit it on fire to stay warm. There was only one thing Jason really had to offer the world: the work that the tights and capes parade didn’t have the stomach for, the work of an outlaw. 

But that isn’t how Roy sees things. Roy looks at Jason like he’s a hero. The first time Jason understood those wide, earnest eyes for what they were, he thought damn it, damn it, damn it, and then planted one on Roy’s mouth, because it was the only way he could think to make it stop.

In retrospect, that had maybe not been the display of tactical genius Jason originally thought it was.

“Hey, hey,” Jason laughs, catching Roy’s wrists and shifting underneath his not inconsiderable weight. “I need your help with something. I got into it with some Ukrainian gun for hire a couple nights back, knocked the rig in my helmet loose. It hasn’t been working right ever since.”

Roy heaves a sigh and ducks down to kiss Jason again, one hand braced next to his head. “You know,” he pulls back, looking at Jason through lidded eyes. “Pretty soon I’m gonna start billing you for this shit.”

“I can afford it.”

Roy makes a skeptical sound in the back of his throat and rises off the floor, tugging Jason up after him with a quiet grunt. 

Jason drags a chair up to the kitchen counter, at which point Langston slinks out of the shadows to investigate. He hops up on the table and peers curiously at Roy, wary of competitors for Jason’s attention. 

“Are you aware that there’s a cat in your apartment?”

“He has a name.”

Roy and Langston warm up to each other eventually, the process eased by the fact Roy quiets a little when he settles down at the table and starts work on Jason’s helmet. Jason takes the seat next to him and throws his legs up on Roy’s chair. Roy shoots him a smile out of the corner of his eye, reaches down to squeeze Jason’s ankle.

Jason means to go over his accounts from last week— try to squeeze out a little money for the low-income tenants’ legal fund he’s been trying to pull together— but he gets distracted. He’s always liked watching Roy work with his hands, slim, clever fingers that move too fast for medium-level geeks like Jason to understand.

“You could do this yourself, you know,” Roy muses, giving Jason a wry look through the hair flopped over his forehead. “All that’s wrong with the radio is the volume control. Get some of that electric contact cleaner from Radio Shack, you’ll be fine.”

“I’m too pretty to know what that is.”

“Uh-huh,” Roy smiles, tweaking something with a hex key. “Your cooling fuse is busted, too. Replace that soon or you’re gonna give yourself heat stroke. Gotham’s basically a concrete swamp in the summer.”

He sets the helmet down and Jason sees a flash of a jagged red gash running up his forearm — newly healed, rough enough that it’ll leave a scar. A souvenir from Amsterdam, Jason would guess. Roy catches him looking and rolls his shoulders back, spurring a small ripple down the muscle in his arms. 

They’re both quiet for a minute. Roy scratches Langston behind the ears and Langston looses a quiet rumble of a purr in response.

“It’s weird,” Roy says quietly. He tugs at the leather bracelets around his wrist, which means he’s nervous. “‘Cause on the one hand, fuck Ollie, right? Fuck him so hard. He’s an asshole. And he definitely doesn’t deserve my help. But on the other hand—… On the other hand, if he’s in a really tough spot, I go. I don’t know. I feel like I have to. I feel like I owe him.”

“You don’t owe him shit,” Jason shakes his head, brow creased in anger. He straightens up in his seat and reaches for Roy’s chin, yanking it up to meet his eyes. “You go because you’re a stupidly good person, Roy.” 

Roy’s mouth tips in a small, crooked smile. He takes Jason’s wrist and kisses the inside of his palm. Jason’s breath freezes in his lungs and, for a minute, his pulse pounds with it — _stay, stay, stay._

_We could get a bigger place_, he almost says, after they fuck and Roy’s kissing the ticklish spots on his ribs because he apparently wants Jason to literally, physically kick him out of bed.

_It doesn’t have to be in Gotham_, he almost says, while they’re brushing their teeth at the sink and Roy’s getting flecks of Colgate all over his newly cleaned mirror. 

_Maybe somewhere with red walls_, he almost says, as they’re pressed together in bed with the AC unit flipped up to max, curled around each other in a way that shouldn’t feel as nice as it does, given how often Jason sleeps alone.

“What’s wrong, Jaybird,” Roy murmurs against his neck, arm tightening slightly around Jason’s waist. He yawns and stretches his legs under the covers, exhales softly. “You wanna be the big spoon?”

“No,” Jason draws his fingers over Roy’s knuckles. “No. Go back to sleep.”

* * *

There are exactly three social activities Jason and Dick can do together without starting some strangely emotionally taxing shit: they can smoke weed, they can bitch about Bruce, or they can work out. On the days their schedules do line up and one of them — usually Dick — attempts to reach out, the occasion is so rare that they often shoot for a three-in-one triple whammy. Robins are uniquely suited to multitasking.

“He acts like he’s too enlightened for it,” Dick pants, jaw tightening in frustration. He’s just a couple paces ahead of Jason — like always. “But he is actually maybe the pettiest man alive.”

Jason huffs a bitter laugh. “Always been that way.”

“I swear it’s getting worse as he’s getting older. Like reverse maturity or something.”

“Or maybe_ you’re_ finally too grown to put up with it.”

“It’s weird that he’s legit old now. I guess when we were kids, I kind of thought he’d be immortal.”

“Yeah,” Jason muses, wiping away the sweat on his upper lip. “Me too.”

They’re quiet for a moment. They’re quiet a lot, when they’re together. 

“Hey,” Dick throws Jason a grin, “Race you to the end of the block!”

He’s off like a shot before Jason can turn him down, the cheating asshole. And he knows Jason’s too competitive to fold just like that, so of course he’ll go barreling after him. Even at full speed, cutting through the early evening Gotham heat feels like straining against molasses, damp humidity settling over Jason like a second skin.

When Jason finally catches up, sneakers skidding to a stop against hot concrete, Dick is hunched over with his hands on his knees. Jason rounds to the front of him and sees a spot of blood seeping through his “Hudson University Dad” t-shirt.

“Damn it,” he mutters, and tugs one of Dick’s arms over his shoulders, dragging him to a nearby bench. “The fuck is wrong with you, you do this shit when you know your body can’t take it.”

“I was fine this morning,” Dick exhales a curse as Jason deposits him on a bench and yanks his stupid shirt up. 

“The hell you were,” Jason rolls his eyes, examining a thick, red set of stitches on Dick’s side, no longer than Tootsie Roll. “When’d you even get this?”

“Let’s just go. I’ll pay for a cab.”

“So you can bleed all over some nice guy’s interior?”

“Give me your hoodie, I’ll dress it.”

“My hoodie? _ My _ hoodie? You’ve got some nerve, Grayson.”

The truth is that this bothers Jason a lot more than he feels like he’s allowed to let on. Dick was always doing shit like this, diving headfirst into easily avoidable pain like it was some kind of penance for the occasional defect in his otherwise pristine moral character. Nobody but Jason ever seemed to notice. Dick was good at that — self-destructing in the quietest, most efficient way possible.

“This looks bad,” Jason winces, dropping Dick’s shirt and sitting back on his heels. “Should I call—“

“No.”

“Damn it. He’s probably gonna think I’m the one who shot you."

Dick snorts, and then his attention snags on something over Jason’s shoulder. It takes Jason a second to realize there’s a figure blocking their sunlight. He turns to look and resists the urge to roll his eyes — some nosy old white lady. Nosy old white ladies loved Dick Grayson. It was only a matter of time before one was magnetized to his dimples and general do-gooding presence.

“Oh dear,” she says, pushing her spectacles up her nose. “Should I get help?”

“We’re fine,” Jason says shortly. Dick offers her a sympathetic smile.

She doesn’t budge, her squinty eyes flicking up to Dick’s face. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Jason grouses, even though she definitely wasn’t speaking to him. “He’s my brother. Get lost.”

He says it mostly to make her shut up and fuck off, but then he remembers what he looks like and what Dick looks like, and throws a smirk over his own shoulder so he can see her racist little brain implode. It does the trick, at least. She starts hobbling back the way she came from at record-breaking old lady speed.

“That was cute,” Dick says, in Russian, because she’s still within earshot.

Jason flips him off.

They take a cab back to Jason’s apartment. Jason doesn’t have any painkillers, but he does have a blunt in the shoebox under his bed, so he fishes that out. They sit on the couch and pass it back and forth, a massive bag of spicy Cheetos between them.

“Who shot you?”

“Grazed me,” Dick corrects, like it matters.

Jason rolls his eyes. “Yeah, Bruce is the pettiest man alive. That’s right.”

Dick throws a Cheeto at him. Jason picks it off his shirt and eats it. Hot Cheetos frankly felt like more of a luxury than the weed, because they _never_ ate this kind of crap growing up. Bruce probably would have bought it for either of them if they'd asked, but asking would've meant that little curl of judgment between his eyebrows, and Jason could never stand to have that look pointed his way for very long.

“Helena Bertinelli,” Dick sighs. "I got shot by Helena Bertinelli."

“Shit,” Jason laughs, and Dick elbows him in the ribs. Jason very tactfully does not ask ‘didn’t you two fuck?’, even though he’s 85% certain they did, and the ‘shooting’ innuendo is _almost_ too good to pass up. “Was is it your fault?”

“Probably,” Dick sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Bruce is pissed.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“He’ll pretend to get over it, and then bring it up again at,” Dick clears his throat and lowers his voice into a mocking model of Bruce’s Batman register, “the opportune moment.”

Jason snorts. “Care less about what he thinks.”

“Yeah,” Dick says bitterly, staring at the joint pinched between his fingers like it somehow contains all the hacks to Bruce’s terrible, paradoxical personality. “I wish. Do you have any Tequila?”

“No. No liquor. Roy was home last week.”

He says it without really meaning to — home. His stomach responds with the typical curl of discomfort, if slightly dulled by the effects of the smoke in his lungs. He pushes past it before Dick can detect anything.

“Anyways, if you’re still in pain there are actually these crazy things called _painkillers._ And you just so happen to be related to a literal aristocrat with an on-call physician who can get the prescription filled and picked up in under an hour.”

Dick’s mouth curves in a tired smile. “Why do you care so much, Jay?”

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question. Most of the time, Jason didn’t even really like Dick. They’d both seen some shit and been through some shit, yet somehow Dick had come out of it all smelling like a rose. He was good at things without trying and he got handed things without so much as having to ask for them. Jason, on the other hand, asked and asked and asked, but still ended up having to steal shit because nobody really wanted to give it to him. It pretty much sucked to grow up in the shadow of someone like Dick, standing as close as he could to all that light and praying some of it would glint off of Jason, too. 

But it was complicated. Dick was also family. So even when he gave Jason one colossal bitch of a tension headache, Jason would still tell him to take his fucking painkillers, because that’s what family did.

“I care,” Jason starts, then pops a Cheeto in his mouth and chews noisily for a couple seconds. “I care, because the first time I saw you do a triple somersault off a rooftop, I could literally feel my heart in my throat. Man, I thought you were the coolest person alive.”

Dick is looking at Jason with a sad kind of smile. Jason presses down the urge to shove a pillow in his face.

“You don’t take care of yourself,” Jason starts, glancing out the window, “no one will ever get to experience that again. So don’t be fucking selfish.”

* * *

When Jason steps out onto the fire escape to take a phone call, his apartment is empty save for the cat snoozing on the windowsill.

When Jason re-enters his apartment fifteen minutes later, there is a child sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Don’t any of you people knock?” Jason asks irritably, rubbing sweaty palms on his pants. “This is not your house.”

Damian is still in his Gotham Academy uniform — blazer, slacks, and a tie that's just a little too big for him. Unless there’s some made-up holiday Jason doesn’t know about happening today, the kid must've cut the last two periods of school. And assembly! Man, Jason used to love assembly, usually because every couple months they’d call him up to the stage and he’d be given some award for academic excellence. 

Damian is clearly having a different experience.

“If I come home early from school one more time this week, Father won’t let me out on patrol.”

“Hey, don’t look to me for advice,” Jason shrugs. “They fucking loved me over there.”

Damian scowls and jerks his head to look moodily out the window. Full swing teenage angst today, then. For a moment Jason actually starts to feel sorry for Bruce, but the thought is derailed when he catches sight of a flash of pink at the base of Damian’s head. 

“Hold up,” he starts, nose wrinkling. “Is that a piece of gum in your hair?”

Damian fiddles with a button the sleeve of his blazer. “It’s not my fault that Patrick von Heinberg fights without honor.”

“Gross. Were you planning on doing anything about that?”

Damian squints at Jason, “I’m going to cut it with one of your kitchen knives.”

“Alright, first of all, that’s disgusting. Somebody else’s kitchen knives? I know who raised you, and I know she raised you better than that.”

Damian somehow manages to twist his expression into something even moodier. He’s such a perfect blend of Bruce and Talia’s features — all sharp angles, well-defined brows, and big, dark eyes. This is, of course, offset by his stubby little kid nose and spiky porcupine hair, but even then, Jason thinks he’ll never quite get used to looking at him.

“What do _you_ suggest I do?” Damian asks, disdain dripping off of every syllable. 

Jason sighs. The problem is that he knows exactly what to do, because it’s what his mom did for him when he was eight years old and Tracy Cavatappi told him he was the color of poop then stuck a piece of Juicy Fruit in his curls. He marvels at the fact that kids — especially the rich, artistic ones at Gotham Academy — haven’t found more creative ways to torment in the past decade. It’s probably killing Damian not to be able to retaliate, either via katana or a months-long scheme to destroy the perpetrator emotionally and socially. 

“Peanut butter,” Jason says, rolling up his shirtsleeves. “You get it out with peanut butter. Come here, I’ll do it for you.”

Damian is skeptical at first, but he seems to weigh it against the option of going home to face the World’s Judgiest Father. Soon enough he’s sitting at the kitchen counter with his tie on the floor and his collar loosened, head tilted forward so Jason can spread a quarter-sized lump of Skippy Super Chunk along the hair at his nape.

“So,” Jason starts, lowering his hands when he’s applied a sufficient amount. “Did you throw the first punch?”

“There was no punching. I flicked him once on his tracheal pressure point and he started crying.”

“Jesus,” Jason laughs. He tentatively tugs at Damian’s peanut butter hair. The gum starts coming loose, and Jason, who has literally pulled bullets out of people with his bare fingers, thinks about how thoroughly disgusting this is. “What compelled you to do that?”

“It didn’t do any long term damage. He couldn't breathe for a _ few seconds _ at most.”

“That’s super not what I asked you, but okay.”

Damian is quiet for a moment, hands curled into angry little fists braced precariously at the edge of the kitchen counter. Moments after meeting the kid, it was clear to Jason that he had inherited his father’s tendency to say one thing and mean something different entirely. Thankfully, Jason is fluent in emotionally stunted child soldier, and thus equipped to translate. 

“There’s a boy in my class named Faisal. The teachers get our names mixed up a lot. Everyone knows that the kitchen orders him specially made halal lunches.”

_ Read: we are friends. We sit together at lunch, so I know what he eats. _

“Patrick Von Heinberg kept waving a piece of pepperoni in his face. It was irritating. So I made him stop.”

_ Read: I impulsively did what I thought was right. _

“He’s fine, now. His shallow, inbred parents will probably buy him a consolation helicopter for his trauma.”

_ Read: Although it’s been explained to me, I still don’t really understand what I did wrong. _

“Nothing,” Jason mutters.

“What?”

“You did nothing wrong.” The lump of gum slides free from Damian’s hair, and Jason abruptly tosses it in the trash. He crosses over to the sink to scrub his hands clean with dish soap. “Admin at schools like GA are predisposed to dislike you. You make any waves at all, they lash out.”

“I’m not even trying to ‘make waves,’” Damian complains, putting the latter half of the sentence in air quotes. “It just keeps happening.”

“Listen, I think it’s a good thing you’re shaking things up over there,” Jason shrugs, drying his hands with a coarse dish towel. “Patrick Von Heinberg sounds like an epic douche who had it coming.”

Bruce wouldn’t see it that way, though. Bruce would want to shield Damian from all of that, would want to keep as little attention on his civilian identity as possible. Disapproval wasn’t quite the right word, but he’d certainly think there was a better way to retaliate, a quieter course of action with more pointed consequences.

But Damian was thirteen. Talk shit, get hit should have been about the most philosophical musing he was capable of.

Damian is staring at him. He has a fleck of peanut butter on his nose.

“What?” Jason asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Thank you,” Damian says shortly. “For taking out the gum.”

_ Read: thank you, for being on my side. _

“Yeah, yeah — don’t get used to it.”

He makes Damian duck his head over the kitchen sink so Jason can scrub shampoo into his sticky hair, properly rinse out the rest of the peanut butter. Damian endures the process with a shocking amount of patience, but he does refuse to blow it dry when they’re done, despite the fact Jason tells him six times he’s gonna get a cold or a headache.

Jason gets a call from Alfred around four, when it’s officially late enough that Damian ought to be home from school. Damian is sitting on the floor of Jason’s apartment with Langston curled on his lap and a towel draped around his shoulders. He’s scrolling nosily through Jason’s Spotify app on the laptop, Jason’s big black Don’t Fucking Talking To Me headphones flattening his wet hair.

“Hey, Alfie,” Jason greets, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder. “He’s here.”

“That’s a rather unexpected turn of events, I must say.”

“Right? I thought Dick was his go-to.”

“Master Dick has been... preoccupied, as of late.”

Oh, right. Shot in the hip by Helena Bertinelli. Jason could hardly keep track of all their ongoing dramas, goddamn telenovela of a family they were.

“You want me to send him home?” 

A pause on the other end of the line. 

“Perhaps it’s best to hold off a little longer.” There’s a faint rustling noise, as if Alfred is turning to glance at someone or something. “I get the sense they could use a small reprieve from each other.”

Jason snorts, “Fine. I won’t kick him out until he wants to go.”

“Thank you, Master Jason. As you’re well aware, your father is... a complicated man.”

“Alfred, you know how I feel about the f-word.”

“And you know how I feel about your f-word, yet you’ve never seen it fit to oblige me.”

Jason lets out a startled laugh. Damn it, he loves Alfred. “We still on for tea next Sunday?”

_ Read: I miss you. _

“Looking forward to it, Master Jason.”

_Read: I miss you, too._

* * *

Jason gets exactly five gifts for his birthday this year.

The first is a massive package from Amazon, dropped on his doorstep while he’s out running errands. It’s from Mia and the rest of the girls at the club — how they even knew it was his birthday he has no clue, but he’s inclined to blame Roy Harper. They send him a coupon for a free shrimp cocktail and a brand new scratching post for Langston. The card, which everyone has signed, even the bouncers, contains a brief message from Mia — _Because I KNOW you’re keeping him. _

The second is a simple, unmarked box left on his fire escape. There are three things inside. On top, a plastic-wrapped container filled to the brim with the deep-fried orange pretzels that were all Jason would eat during his first week back from the dead. Underneath is a velvet pouch containing a solid gold chain. At the very bottom lies a handwritten note that reads ‘if you don’t want it, sell it and buy a new apartment. - T.’

The third is from Dick, who gets him a bed frame and pays some poor sucker from Ikea to carry it up the stairs and install it. It’s a huge pain in the ass because Dick fails to let him know when the guy is coming — or that he’s coming at all— so he arrives just as Jason’s gearing up to head out for the night, and Jason has to hastily shove his Red Hood helmet in the microwave before answering the door. 

On the other hand, though, it’s actually so fucking nice to lay down on a mattress that doesn’t slide the slightest bit when he moves. Jason would classify the ordeal as pretty annoying, but ultimately worth it, and that was generally the experience of being Dick Grayson’s brother.

The birthday card Dick sends says ‘From Dick’, and then, squeezed next to it: ’and Tim’, ‘Damian’, followed by ‘Steph’ in very tiny handwriting. Freeloaders. 

Roy delivers the fourth in person. 

Jason’s big day-of birthday plans include avoiding everyone who might actually want to spend time with him and instead burying himself deep in a case. Unfortunately, the concentrated attention means the whole thing wraps up well before midnight, concluding when Jason kidnaps a corrupt politician, staples an envelope of evidence to his monogrammed pajamas, and drops him on the steps of the Gotham PD building. 

So he's bounding up the stairs to his apartment at eleven PM, bored and restless, pulse humming with adrenaline. He’s also slightly regretting his decision to tell people he was far too busy with important saving-the-city business to actually go out tonight. What the hell is he gonna do now? Eat reheated Indian food and watch Love Island all by his sexy self?

“Hey, is happy birth-jay an intuitive pun?”

Jason pauses on the landing.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about it for, like, fifteen minutes. I was gonna write it on the card. Although, based on your face right now, I’m thinking maybe I made the right call.”

Roy Harper is leaning up against his front door, holding a Barnes and Noble gift bag in one hand and a ‘Get Well Soon!’ Helium balloon in the other. He’s supposed to be in Star City this week, still working on that op with Ollie that he refuses to tell Jason about despite Jason’s multiple attempts to pull it out of him with various sexual favors.

“What are you doing here?” Jason asks, blinking at him. 

Roy grins and jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Shit, should I leave?”

“Shut up. I just didn’t…” —_ have time to prepare for you. You drop in here and it’s like feelings bombing. Also, maybe I would’ve worn deodorant this morning _, “…expect you.”

Roy leans his head back against the door, appraising Jason in silence for a couple dragging seconds. “Good surprise or a bad one?”

“Good,” Jason says, before he can convince himself that’s a bad idea. He swallows around a dry throat. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Roy parrots, probably making fun of him.

The gift inside the bag turns out to be a copy of Toni Morrison’s _Beloved_ from the Barnes and Noble gold collection. It’s officially the prettiest thing Jason owns. Roy has also tucked a laminated coupon for “Piping Hot Sex” in the middle of the pages. He tells Jason it’s a two in one deal, because he can redeem it now and use it as a bookmark later. Jason punches him on the arm.

They fall asleep tangled together on the couch, Jason tracing a brand new tat of a blue jay on Roy’s shoulder.

* * *

Bruce delivers the fifth gift when he breaks into Jason’s apartment the next morning.

Jason blinks awake and the first thing he sees is Bruce’s face looming over them both, which would be traumatizing enough without the added detail of Roy Harper currently laying on top of him in boxers. At first he thinks he’s having some sort of nightmare, but a couple more seconds tick by and Jason decides it’s real. Even the Evil Bruce in Jason’s head didn’t loom quite so…. loom-ily. 

“Hello,” Bruce says. If he’s surprised at the sight of Roy — specifically Jason’s arms wrapped around Roy, and Roy’s face tucked into Jason’s neck — he doesn’t let it show. “Can we go for a walk?”

Jason pulls an arm out from under Roy to rub at his eyes. Fuck no, he can’t go for a walk at what is indisputably ass o’clock in the morning, given the faint grayish-pink of the sky outside his window. He’s about to open his mouth to communicate this to Bruce in the most expletive-laden way he possibly can, but then he takes a second to really look at him, and realizes that his intense-as-fuck stare is somehow even more piercing than usual. Which means something is Capital U Up.

“Gimme a second,” he croaks. 

There is literally nothing worse than the arduous process of extracting himself from Roy, then scanning the mess on the living room floor for his sweatshirt, then attempting to tug said sweatshirt over his head without strangling himself, all while Bruce looks on in a thousand dollar peacoat and impeccably coiffed hair. 

“Hey,” Roy starts to stir, exhaling a quiet yawn as Jason tugs on his sneakers. “What’re you…”

Jason leans over the back of the couch and drops a kiss on his sleepy mouth. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

Roy blinks awake then, awareness seeping into dim green eyes. He throws a sharp glance at Bruce. “You sure?”

“It’s fine. I’ll be back soon.”

He rumples Roy’s hair and grabs his keys off the coffee table, feeling Bruce’s eyes pinned on him like a physical hold. He follows Jason out wordlessly, not acknowledging Roy’s presence at all. Bruce always does at least six things that irritate Jason in any given conversation — looks like they got a jump on the first one pretty damn early. 

Jason thinks they’re just gonna walk on the side street by his house, but Bruce gestures to the Bentley parked at the curb. Jason begrudgingly gets in. Whenever he sits in the passenger seat and Bruce drives, he feels distinctly like a little kid. And when they drive in silence, like now, he feels specifically like a _reprimanded_ little kid, which has the added bonus of being completely implausible because it’s too fucking early in the morning for Jason to have even done anything worth reprimanding.

“Where are we going?” he asks Bruce, tugging his sweatshirt tighter around his shoulders. 

“Thought we’d walk by the water.”

Jason rolls his eyes and looks moodily out the window, then hears Dick’s voice in his head telling him he’s a cliché, and looks moodily at his sneakers instead. 

There’s a stretch of road that could be vaguely called “a waterfront” near the Gotham harbor, but Jason doesn’t know why anyone would really want to walk there anyway. The water is a deeply unappealing grayish brown, the rocky beachfront is covered in trash, and certain stretches of the sidewalk smell strongly of urine. Jason likes it because it was his only exposure to any scenery that could reasonably be classified as “nature” for the first ten years of his life. Bruce likes it because he has a bone-deep, unshakeable loyalty to Gotham, even the ugliest parts of it.

“Happy belated.”

It’s the first thing Bruce says to him after they’ve been walking in awkward silence for a few minutes, gravel crunching beneath their shoes.

“Thanks.”

Nothing again, save for the obnoxious squawking of seagulls and the muffled sounds of a couple guys yelling at each other in thick east Gotham accents.

“I got you something.”

“You didn’t have to,” Jason says, scrubbing at tired eyes. “I mean. You really, really didn’t have to.”

“It’s alright if you don’t want it. Just take a look.”

In truth, Jason can think of few things more grating than a birthday gift from Bruce. It will undoubtedly be something weird and expensive, something that he’ll feel guilty for having, would feel even guiltier for selling, and will ultimately end up never really using. It’s especially ironic because Bruce is normally an incredible gift giver, but he doesn’t know Jason as well as he used to. Jason’s no longer sure who’s more to blame for that one. 

“Jason?” Bruce asks. He’s holding out a small package wrapped in simple brown paper. It is distinctly book shaped.

“Sorry,” Jason mumbles, and takes the package.

They move off the pathway and settle on one of the rickety wooden picnic benches that no one has actually had a picnic on since the 1980s. It’s crazy how Bruce Wayne manages to look dignified while squinting at a dirty limerick someone’s carved in the tabletop. Jason’s mouth twitches into a brief smile as he pulls the paper apart with his fingers.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, taking in the sight of a very familiar orange-blue cover. He shucks the rest of the wrapping off with a soft crumpling noise and runs his fingers over the crease on the bottom left corner.

“It took a while to find.” Something wavers in Bruce’s voice. “You’d be surprised how many secondhand bookstores there are in West Gotham.”

“Holy shit,” Jason says again.

Before things got all bad at home— before they were even mostly bad, really— Jason’s mom used to read him a couple pages from _ The Hobbit _ every night before bed. She had voices for every character and she could make a dragon shadow puppet with her fingers. It was the first book Jason really loved and one of the few he owned right up until the end, when he started selling most of their shit for food.

He remembers telling Bruce how much he’d loved it during that first birthday he spent at the manor. At the time he figured the book was long gone, sitting on someone else’s shelf or at the bottom of a recycling bin. Jason had tried to be blasé about it, aggressively pretending to have moved on, but Bruce had those magic eyes that used to see right through him.

Jason never thought he’d hold it again — have a piece of her so close again.

He thumbs open the front cover and there in the margins is his mother’s familiar scrawling print, and his own middle school handwriting squeezed alongside hers. He didn’t have anything particularly smart to say the same way she did; he’d just wanted so badly to be like her. The one on the page Jason’s opened to says ‘cool!’ in red colored pencil, accompanied by a crude doodle of a shooting star. 

He faintly registers dampness around his eyes and rubs them dry with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Bruce is looking at him. Bruce is always looking at him and most of the time he finds it profoundly annoying, but just this once, he understands.

“I sent it to a conservator in New York and had the binding re-done.” Bruce twists the rings on his left hand. “If you don’t want it—“

“Shut up,” Jason interrupts, and wipes his eyes again. “Jesus. Don’t you ever shut up?”

He pulls Bruce into a hug. Bruce holds him tight, an arm around Jason’s shoulders and a hand on the back of his head, just like when Jason was a kid. He holds Jason like he’s wanted to do it for a long time, like he’s afraid of what will happen when he lets go.

“Thank you,” Jason says, voice muffled by Bruce’s jacket.

Bruce squeezes his shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

Jason pulls back and puts his hand over his mouth to (unsuccessfully) cover the sound of the most humiliating sniffle known to man. He looks down at the book on his lap one more time, and thinks _Christ. Fuck Bruce Wayne._ What is he even supposed to say to him? ‘Thank you’ doesn’t cover half of the shit between them. Most of the time, their whole relationship feels like some fucked up zero-sum game that Jason keeps getting tricked into playing. It’s complicated and tiring and Jason doesn’t give a damn about what he gains or loses, he just wishes he didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Then Bruce does some crap like this. And Jason thinks maybe it’s a good thing that they both refuse to fold.

“I gotta go, B,” he says, gingerly sliding _The Hobbit_ into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. “Roy’ll call the whole Rogues Gallery on you if I’m gone much longer.”

Bruce nods and looks out over the water. Jason watches as his mask slips back into place, his eyes grow cool and his mouth freezes into that seemingly permanent line of disapproval.

It makes Jason smile a little. He hops off the picnic table and dusts off his sweats.

“Do you need a ride back?”

“Subway’s fine.”

“Alright,” Bruce says, like that’s exactly what he was expecting. “Take care.”

Jason snorts and claps Bruce hard on the shoulder, just to watch his eye twitch. “Yeah. You too, old man.”

He walks to the subway station under the warmth of the early morning sun. Light sinks into his skin and he breathes in the hazy air, that special Gotham blend of coffee, various pollutants, and day-old garbage. The city has just started to wake up — pre-caffeine early risers shuffle through the streets, grates rattle as they’re pulled up over storefronts. Jason shoves his hands in his pockets and thinks about his shitty apartment, and Roy sleeping on his couch, and the fact that he lives ten minutes away from Mama Dough.

Maybe he loves this city. And maybe he loves Roy, too. It’s not as hard to admit, with fingers clasped around his mom’s favorite book and another only kind of crappy year to tuck under the belt of his mostly crappy life.

_ Ha_, he thinks, turning his grin to the sky. _ Take that, Universe. _

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday JT i love u... quidhitch on tumblr


End file.
